A CELEBRATION OF RESEARCH
Armaity
Minwalla With a love of music and a career goal of medicine, Armaity Minwalla, a 2013 alum, decided to combine the two for her Academic Research Project. That in turn led her to a summer internship at Wayne State University. And that in turn led her to the Detroit Medical Center. “I bounced ideas around for my ARP for a while and decided to turn my attention to mental health,” she says. “I don’t know my ultimate goal in medicine, but I do know I want to study medicine.” Through her ARP, Minwalla took the correlation between mental health and music and broke it down to study the relationship between music therapy and obsessivecompulsive disorder. “I wanted to do a fullblown study, but ended up doing a theoretical approach, using autism, depression epilepsy, attention deficit disorder and Alzheimer’s disease, and compared them to OCD on a molecular level,” she says. “In other words, what chemicals are involved and what does music do to those different proteins. My conclusions, based on the research, were that music therapy would help OCD, of course, it would need further testing to confirm.” With the experience of her ARP research to
assist her, Minwalla did an internship before her senior year at Liggett at Wayne State’s Department of Neurosurgery. She also did a second internship that summer through the department of psychiatry at the Detroit Medical Center. “I decided to look at music therapy and ADD and found the inspiration to study other disorders,” she says, adding that following her first year at the University of Michigan she wanted to get more research experience. So she decided to apply for an internship through Wayne State University’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, for which she was recommended by Dr. Vicki Diaz. “I’ve learned that everything involving research is at the molecular level, unless you are doing behavioral studies,” she says. Minwalla, now in her second year at U of M, says that both her internships and her ARP experience prepared her for her for working at Wayne State studying fetal alcohol syndrome, where she works in the labs of Dr. Alana Conti, where she also worked in preparation for her ARP, and under the mentorship of Dr. Laura Susick. At Wayne State, Minwalla was studying the studying the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome on mice. “We know in fetal
“It’s never over in research, and the ARP taught me that.” - Armaity Minwalla ‘13
alcohol syndrome there is extreme cell death. What we want to know is what’s behind that cell death,” she explains. Minwalla says she thinks it would have been a tougher adjustment in the lab without her ARP experience and her experience in general at Liggett. “Doing the ARP prepared me tremendously for what I’m doing now,” she says. “I had to go and make those initial connections and contacts, myself. It was ‘here’s a contact go seek them out.’ Nothing was done for you. There was no hand-holding,” she says about compiling the research for her ARP. She says having to approach professionals and ask for help at Liggett has made her comfortable and confident enough to talk to her superiors in the lab. “I can go up to my primary investigator and feel very comfortable talking to her. I feel very comfortable talk-
ing to people in general,” she says. In addition she says having to complete an ARP taught her time management skills and helped her develop a strong work ethic. “With the ARP I had deadlines to meet, but the ARP is also about learning how to talk to superiors, learning how to do research and learning that research is a huge project,” she says. “It’s never over in research, and the ARP taught me that.” While Minwalla is learning a lot, has enjoyed her time at Wayne State and is grateful to get the hands-on experience, she’s learned that research is secondary to her passion of helping women. “Right now I’m thinking OB/GYN,” she says. “As an OB/GYN you get to be there at every stage, working with women.”
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